Gianni Schicchi

I enjoyed the all-video chat performance of Gianni Schicchi by Opera Ithaca. It's a quick, cute comedic opera, so having it set as a family video chat call worked for the story and setting.

The audio recording was surprisingly clear (my ears kept expecting laptop-microphone quality and being impressed at the actual recording of voices and orchestra), and the video editing included some unexpected surprises, like when... everyone's singing faces were live-photoshopped onto a flock of chickens running around? The lines of libretto that explicitly describe taking actions (like hiding the body, or putting on hats, or passing around the will) were all handled cleverly as a video call, and while it wasn't clear if everyone was supposed to be in different rooms of the same house, it overall worked and was adorable.

This post's theme word is equipollent (adj), "equal in power, force, or effect." The potential heirs found the profits from forgery to be equipollent with the dangers of exile.

Every Place I Cry

Every Place I Cry was an improvised emo concert, whose direct-to-me marketing absolutely worked because I love Jess McKenna and Zach Reino (of the terrific Off Book: The Improvised Musical Podcast -- watch e.g. this live performance of "We Object to Fear").

It was great! I've appreciated the artists who have managed to set up the tech and broadcast live performances from social-distance-ville; it has broadened the variety of art available to me here in my house (and even in my city).

There were lots of little nods to the emo genre, familiar from middle and high school and possibly not even accessible to anyone of a different age or background, but... just... so... completely... delightful! to me. And kudos to them for their many consistent character choices (including emo artist names on each performer's Zoom byline), set dressing (crows! perched on everything! terrible shirts and hair!), and on-stage banter as if in an in-person venue, including ending the night with "thank you"s and "Be safe on your way back... to the other rooms of your house."

This post's theme word is heteroclite (n), "a person who is unconventional; a word that is unconventionally formed." Inventing an emo band is stereotyping heteroclites: curiously contradictory, but verbally delightful.

Live theatre, sort of

WHEREAS the ongoing pandemic and various other elements of environmental, social, political, economic, and biological disaster loom large, and

WHEREAS the rational fairly strict self-quarantine (of those who are able) has, since March, severely limited occasions to socialize and gather in groups for the purposes of mutually enjoying culture and company, it is

HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGED that having so many performers shift to an online method for displaying their art to a geographically disparate crowd has, in fact, WIDENED this reader's ability to financially support the artists she loves while appreciating their performances in real-time.

Everything's on a screen, and frankly having to see my family only in delineated, buffered, pixelated windows feels much more limiting than having to see live performers in windows. Realistically these performers would have been mostly inaccessible because they were not touring my locality; so I find a tiny sliver of redemption for 2020 in the broader access to live art. The rest of 2020 should consider itself still on blast for its shortcomings.

This post's theme word is rort (n), "a wild party." I have tickets to watch shows three nights this week, from the comfortable pajama-clad rort of my own sofa!

Peter and the Wolf

Swarthmore College Lab Orchestra's presentation of Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf was delightful --- playful, cute, fun, and with an auditorium full of children who shrieked at the scary parts. Like many others in the audience, I brought my parents, and we all had an enriching time. I particularly appreciated that we were invited onstage after the performance to chat with the musicians and look at their instruments up-close.

We later in the afternoon remembered that the iconic wolf music was the "bully" theme music from A Christmas Story.


This post's theme word is exclosure (n), "a fenced area, especially in a wide open area, to keep unwanted animals out." The wolf was captured outside the exclosure!

Crisp clear spring sky

When I walked to work this morning the sun had just risen and it was cold, so I wore my jacket and mittens. But it turned out to be a warm, clear spring day, and my outerwear is overdone.

Just look at this cleanly blue sky, framed by local spring-ready trees:

This post's theme song is Ben Platt's "Better", which has been on a loop in my head all day. It is sad and angry and an emotional wreck of a breakup song, but the self-echoing refrain scratches a mental itch and is immensely satisfying to hear. (Plus there are tons of repeated lyrics and they follow standard rhyme patterns, so it's quick to memorize.)

Don Giovanni

Opera Philadelphia's production of Don Giovanni offers a very minimal staging and scenery; the stage is draped, from the high ceiling to just above head height, with shimmering golden curtains. Between the curtains and the floor, a bevvy of upright pianos ring the stage. Throughout the production, these pianos were wheeled across the stage and served as scenery, as prop storage, as trees in the garden, as indoor furniture, as walls, and as miscellaneous stationary objects to swoon against.

The performance was lovely and the music was as melodic, and crunchy, and satisfying as Mozart always is. But the plot was inescapably gross, as it centers on a serial sex offender who won't take "no" for an answer and whose every action is manipulative and dismissive of other people. It's hard to see the plot in any other light, and even the mild opera-style staging of the scenes made my skin crawl, as Don Giovanni continually pressed against women and called to them from across the stage and in every way maneuvered the people around him to match his will.

(I recently sat in on some interesting lectures re: Don Giovanni, so I recognize that even at the time it was composed, part of the point of the plot was how noblemen could manipulate people of lesser status in this way. Thanks, Prof. Blasina, for letting me crash your class!)

... and so it was satisfying enough, I suppose, that in the final scene, Don Giovanni is literally dragged to hell, though my reasons for wishing him ill may have differed from original audience's reasons. But overall I'm surprised that this opera continues to be the most-performed opera in the world; perhaps momentum will take it awhile to lose that status? In any case, I've seen it several times now and don't feel any desire to ever see it again.


This post's theme word is nuncupate (v tr), "to solemnly pronounce," or "to declare a will orally." She resolved and nuncupated, and only listened to the audio for evermore.

Dear Evan Hansen

Dear Evan Hansen is a recent Broadway musical, focused on themes of connectivity (digital, interpersonal) and isolation (same). See previously.

It continues to be a triumph of theater, an incredible and carefully-constructed mirror of reality which is so achingly accurate that it shakes its audience with their own feelings of isolation and desperate loneliness.

Plus I like music, and words.

D. and I saw it from excellent seats --- front center of the balcony --- and the perspective, the separation of audience from stage, completely vanished in the immediacy of the drama. It feels real, it feels like watching reality, and actual interactions between characters with the depth and conflicts of real people.

It still made me cry; there were pauses in the action where, in the silence between lines, the sound of the entire audience softly weeping could be heard. So I was not alone. (Major theme and repeated leitmotif: "you are not alone".) I liked having D. there to bounce theories and analyses around; he went a bit further than I did, finding a Greek-style framing device in the first and last scene, but who can blame him? I think a little analysis helps scab over the raw, shredded feelings that the musical elicits.

This post's theme word is bavardage (n), "chattering; gossip." The cacophony of bavardage that is surround-sound twitter/instagram/youtube/blogs is effectively overwhelming, whether staged or naturally experienced.

What song was most recently stuck in your head?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What song was most recently stuck in your head?

Students are in a different cultural bubble than I am, so please forgive any typos I've introduced in accidentally transcribing their handwriting, and also... I can't even tell if some of these are actual songs, or just a series of words strung together.

• Taylor Swift's new song
• Promiscuous - Nelly furtado
• Heart of Glass
• Rabbit Heart
• DARE
• Cherub Rock
• That one remix of the horrible meme song that doesn't have a name?
• chocolate chip cookie
• cold cold man
• wake me up when sept ends
• coconut song on YouTube
• Diamonds
• Anime un Po'
• I am Moana
• Pakkanen
• Liang Zhu
• My Way by Frank Sinatra
• Wagon Wheel
• the Schumann piece I'm learning
• In a sentimanta [sic] mood
• Something Just like this
• Brite Lites
• Super Rich Kids - Frank Ocean
• Rich Love
• Apartment
• Dvorak New World Symphony
• Despacito

The winner was "Dragon Tales", with two (!) votes, which I won't look up but will instead guess is a theme song to an animated TV show.

This post's theme word is epimone, "the rhetorical device of frequent repetiton of a phrase or question; dwelling on a point." LMFAO's iconic song "Shots" seems to have been mostly written by epimone, or a regular expression like:  "(shots)*".

Dear Evan Hansen

This musical will forcibly draw tears from your tear ducts. It will wrench the feelings straight out of your heart and condense them on your face as salt water.

Evan Hansen (protagonist) is a high school senior, and socially anxious to a degree that projects out to the last seat in the theater. He has usual high school senior worries --- college applications, trying to make friends, talking to his crush --- and some unusual ones; when a classmate commits suicide, he finds himself drawn into an increasingly elaborate construction of a false past friendship, because it helps him form actual current friendships. But they're based on lies, so how real are they?

End synopsis.

The titular protagonist is achingly lonely and isolated, despite being surrounded by social media (figuratively "surrounded" in the usual psychological sense; literally "surrounded" in the staging, with screens projected everywhere). This highlights the now-trite observation that we are more interconnected (in terms of data transfer) and less connected (social constructs like friendship) nowadays.

I have a lot of thoughts about why this musical is so deeply affecting, and why it has its hooks in my mind so firmly, but they're not coherent and to some extent it's just: I'm wired this way, catchy music is catchy, the story feels both timely and realistic. No flying across the stage or magic, and the least-realistic part is perhaps that people break into coordinated song mid-conversation, but... let's posit that in my mind, this often happens anyway. So perhaps "realistic" is not as accurate as "realistic to the mental reality I inhabit", which: ditto for the ideas about isolation, connectivity, the endless rehashing of previous social interactions. (Though I think I carry them off with a lot less outwards anxiety than Evan.)

On the topic of mistakes made publicly and online --- which form the core of the spiraling-out-of-control plot --- I completely agree with Scott Alexander, who wrote that it's "bizarre that we dare to talk at all when we know every word we say is logged and the future may be less forgiving than the past."

It's not clear what will happen after the plot is over, in the world of Dear Evan Hansen, and somehow the plot is so catchy, the ideas explored are so deeply captivating, that my mind has never wondered over to the area of: hey, what happens after the curtain is lowered? I don't know and can't hypothesize; everything is so utterly messed-up, and there is no hope of redemption; if there is any moral at all, it's that we should all have a short memory for bad things and a long memory for good ones, and absolutely no engagement with social media at all.

... welcome to my personal blog! Wonder of wonders, irony of ironies.

This post's theme word is pudency (n), "modesty, bashfulness." Is it a social anxiety disorder or just a profusion of pudency?

Invisible catnip-cloak

Certain sentences can grind my brain to a halt, demanding attention and completely derailing the reading process, whether by tone, word choice, lyricism, or utter rhetorical madness. Witness:

This amalgamated aesthetic is catnip to a significant portion of American listeners but functions like an invisibility cloak against music writers.

This sentence, appearing in Jia Tolentino's "The Slippery Appeal of the Biggest New Band in America" in The New Yorker, compels further contemplation.

Partly I perform a readerly revel at the idea of an aesthetic which can simultaneously be catnip and and invisibility cloak. (Or at least, catnip which "functions like" an invisibility cloak. Is it worn? Eaten? Brandished?) Partly I cringe at this strangely not-quite-metaphor. Partly I am ready to accept any sentence beginning with the awesome and alliterative "amalgamated aesthetic".

But the biggest part, and the final one for me, is the sheer audacity of writing a sentence about "music writers" in an article about music; this is an incredible feat of non-self-recognition on the part of the author, who surely must be labelled as a music writer. And to whom this band is --- as the feature and focus of this article-let --- definitely visible.


This post's theme word is  eclose, "(of an insect) to emerge as an adult from the pupa or as a larva from the egg." Twenty One Pilots' hit song "Stressed Out" focuses on the difficulties and angst of eclosure.

Iolanta / The Nutcracker

The Palace Garnier is a beautiful building, ornate and baroque and frankly luscious inside. (See previous shots of the lobby.) The performance hall is just as sumptuous, with tiers of box-lined balconies and everything done in red velvet and gold.

The boxes look nice, and as you can see, they serve as wonderful vantage points for looking at the other boxes. The stage? Not so much.

The neighbor-box dividing wall --- lined in red and buffering me from the lower classes who were presumably permitted into the lesser boxes --- blocks one corner of the stage. The overhanging lip of the next tier blocks the upper third of the area, including the opera titles. Not pictured here, but the people sitting in front of me, as they variously shift and lean to try to see the stage, blocked even more.

So the visual part of the spectacle was difficult.

Luckily, the Opéra Garnier production of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta used only an inset, centered portion of the stage. I read the synopsis beforehand, so the omission of the opera titles (and my weakness in Russian) did not impede my enjoyment of the music and singing. It was lovely, one completely standard and satisfactory unit of opera enjoyment. So of course I have almost nothing to say about it, and lots to say about the rest of the evening.

Following the opera, the ballet performed The Nutcracker, in a non-Christmas-themed staging that I wasn't able to cohere into a single plot. The various scenes were only loosely connected, via interesting stagecraft. The single-room set in which Iolanta took place drew back and slotted into a larger set which filled the stage, where The Nutcracker began as a 1920s-themed children's birthday party. (Of note: Iolanta had a Christmas tree onstage, which was removed for The Nutcracker, in some kind of reverse-Chekov's-gun/red herring ploy.) This included a very cool game of improvised freeze-tag synchronized with the music. Ballet companies should play freeze tag in public more often, it is really fun to watch. This scene ended with a harsh exploding noise, and the building apparently (?) succumbed to an earthquake, with rubble (!) falling from everywhere and blanketing the stage. A transparent screen completely divided the stage from the theater, so no rubble or its considerable dust settled on the orchestra or audience. The pas de deux was staged as two survivors of this earthquake. (I think. A lot of it took place on the occluded side of the stage.) Then, in my favorite use of the screen-wall, giant fans gusted snow all across the stage to its full height, like a blizzard. Heavily wool-jacket-bundled ballet dancers did a kind of freezing coordinated squall dance that was interesting, and not really like other ballet I've seen. 

Ballet in a snowstorm.

Check out the gallery for more, and to get an idea of the variety of spectacle presented across the evening.

This post's theme word is furfuraceous, "covered in dandruff" or "flaky". I do not envy the scene-changers their furfuraceous task during the second intermission.

Il trovatore

Verdi's Il trovatore is a... an opera. I wanted to write something like "a jolly operatic jaunt into the stereotyped gender-roles of yestercentury" but I don't think that my sarcastic tone carries through sufficiently. So I'll save "jolly" to describe operas which are nonironically jolly, pleasant romances and cross-dressing comedies.

This one is not that.

The music is gorgeous. The performers were excellent. (Several enthusiastic audience members audibly cried, "Bravo! Bravo!" after particularly emotive arias.) The staging was abstract and stark, which is not my favorite type of visual spectacle. The stage was a bare grey-brown rectangle, out of which a grid of vertical rectangular slabs could be lifted to various heights, surrounded on three sides by giant mirrors. The slabs were used to build the cells in a prison, or suggest a graveyard, or as military foxholes. It was a creative use of monochromatic 3D rectangles to portray a variety of settings. (See the slideshow here.) The costumes were mostly also a drab grey-brown, all military fatigues and gypsies wearing rags and dark overcoats. The blocking was rectangular and fixed, too, although this could just have been suggested and accentuated by the stage decorations. (My preference tends more towards staging, choreography, costumes, and sets which could be described as "lush", or "ornate", or magnificently "rococo.")

I loved the music.

I detested the plot. Its overarching theme, reinforced with every scene and sometimes every line in a scene, was that women are property, to be owned, punished, and exchanged by men. Booooo. It's a historical attitude, sure, and modern performances are literally restricted by the limits of the libretto. But still. Even within the plot, the female lead Leonora tries to use socially-acceptable techniques to control her fate (although not to own herself, never to own herself, remember: women are property, she can at most influence which man owns her). She tries to take vows at a nunnery and is interrupted by not one but two men (that cursed love triangle) who come to repossess her.

Lots of other plot crap happens. Read the synopsis if you like; it contains details that are so subtle that they are not even mentioned aloud during the opera, and YMMV based on the starkness and detail-paucity of your particular production. This is one of those plots where if all the characters could just sit down (unarmed) around a table and talk for 5 minutes (or maybe 45 if they're singing instead), the entire plot could be resolved, with no dramatic irony or tension or really much of a hassle at all.

Instead, everyone dies. (Well, almost everyone.)

There, I've spoiled it for you, as much as a 150-year-old opera which follows all the opera stereotypes can be spoiled. (Perhaps I've spoiled all operas for you: everyone dies at the end! Voilà!)


This post's theme word is makebate, "one who incites quarrels." Based on historical data, librettists tend to be inflammatory makebates: consider at how many duels, wars, fights, and poisonings they incite.

Musée d'Orsay en fête

I saw a concert at the Musée d'Orsay last night as part of a weekend-long celebration. The music was a nice selection --- all in French, even the librettos usually performed in Italian --- and the frission of being in the museum after hours, of nestling in amongst the statuary to listen to music, was very pleasant. The acoustics fulfilled exactly the expectations of a refitted train station; the soaring ceiling, so open to light and space for visually-experienced art, simply sucked up a lot of the sound. What sound remained was bounced around in off-beat echoes. Also, some of the stage lights were pointed directly at the crowd, I guess so that the glare-induced headaches would distract from the echoing cavern.

An interesting experience.

An unconventional use atop an unconventional use of a train station.

HT: R, who found this event, suggested attendance, and accompanied me. We had fun.

This post's theme word is lyceum, "a lecture hall or an institution that provides public lectures, discussions, concerts, etc." Each lyceum has its own acoustic profile, suitable to certain activities above others.

Friday night III: La Voix Humaine

La Voix Humaine is an opera for one voice. Alone. I have never encountered such a thing, but this was curious and fascinating and jarring. The production I saw featured very stark scenery --- an ornately tiled floor and a single white sofa --- and a straight-overhead camera view, which was projected on the backdrop. This gave an unsettling double-view of Barbara Hannigan in the role of "Elle" (simply: Her), who threw her body across the stage in sprawling and unusual configurations.

The opera's premise is that She is talking on the phone, and so at first it seems natural, and intimate, that we see Her sprawl on the floor, drape herself across the sofa, lunge, and flop as one does when engaged in a protracted phone call, meandering across the stage as the topic of conversation wanders. The doubled view, once from the front and once from squarely above, makes the single performer fill the space; her every gesture seems significant, and the way her limbs trail behind her voice, aligning with patterns in the floor-tiles one moment and then skewing disorderly across them the next.

The music is dissonant and bizarre, which pretty accurately reflects the way it feels to hear only one half of a not-particularly-discursive intimate phone call. This discomfort is enhanced by the frequent breaks where the call is interrupted or dropped, and has to be re-established; the phone rings, the orchestra beeps and plucks. I never really felt like any songs happened, just a sort of long series of short bursts of tones and phrases, although I leave this categorization to the musical experts.

It was great. The staging of this production gradually suggests, and then strongly suggests, and then outright reveals, that She is an unreliable narrator --- even though we are watching her, as she describes her actions, there is a weirdly discordant process happening. I found it very engaging, but I was also nervous the entire time, faintly on edge about what would happen. Continually reevaluating what happened earlier, what she said, what it sounded like, how she moved, and comparing with my current version of events. The music definitely reinforced this tension. The Wikipedia plot summary does not reflect the plot of the version I saw; this production used the same libretto, but told a much darker story with a definite conclusion.

I don't want to spoil it, because I hold unreliable narrators in great esteem. I enjoyed watching it once, but I don't have any particular desire to watch it again; too tense.


This post's theme word logomarchy, "a dispute about words," or "a battle fought with words." Beware the telephonic logomarchy.

Friday night II: Le Château de Barbe-Bleue

Bluebeard's Castle struck me as darkly humorous, like a twisted gothic take on an already-perverse Gorey story. Let me summarize the plot (spoiler alert):

Bluebeard brings his love, Judith, back to his castle for the first time. She loves him dearly. (A pause to note: Ekaterina Gubanov's voice was seductive, luscious, dark, complex. Fantastic. Compelling.) But his castle is so dark! Won't he give her a key to open some rooms, and let in the light? Bluebeard reluctantly gives her a key: to the dungeon, it turns out, which is full of chains and torture implements and they are covered and dripping with blood. Very shocking, but Judith soon begs Bluebeard for another key, to air out his dim and shady castle, and sings of her love for him as motive.

The next key opens the armoury, where all his weapons are ranked and stored, but every blade is stained with blood, which pools on the floor and is rusting everything. Pretty bad housekeeping. Judith may sing beautifully and her love is very compelling, but she does not see where this is heading, and asks for more keys. Apparently each door has its own key in this castle, and Bluebeard is something of a security nut, although the ease with which he metes out his keys to Judith suggests that he has, at best, intermittent relationship boundary issues.

Judith gets three more keys, having assured Bluebeard of her very strong love and her aversion to the dark and forbidding atmosphere in the castle. In a turn of events, the next key opens the jewel-house, full of ornate jewelry, but as Judith tries it on she finds that all of the jewelry is coated in blood. Unsettling. She pauses, but Bluebeard is getting into the reluctant swing of things and opens the next door: surprise! It opens onto a garden; at least one audience member is confused by the geometry of space in Bluebeard's domain, further obfuscated by the very abstract staging (Krzysztof Warlikowski) and direction (Esa-Pekka Salonen) which has the rooms, each a transparent fishtank-style chamber, sliding across the stage on rails so that they semi-obscure each other. The pool of blood extends over more than one room's floor, and when the rooms line up the edges of the blood match; it is a gruesome puzzle, but Judith can't put it together. Maybe the fifth balcony's elevation gave me a perspective she lacks. Literally.

A garden is nice, though, right? Yes, full of lovely flowers --- but they are [let's all say it together!] bathed in blood! Bluebeard has unorthodox horticultural practices, to say the least, sanguinely watering his blooming plants. Bluebeard proceeds to open the next door, which reveals a vista, stretching over all Bluebeard's holdings: lands stretch away from the window (or balcony? again, geometry is not a strong point here), and Judith is astonished at their beauty. At last, the castle is open and airy, well-lit.

That's not so bad, you think, and there's not a single thing on the balcony that is drenched in blood! Maybe Bluebeard's housekeeping is not so atrocious. Right. But wrong. Clouds scudding across the sky cast blood-red shadows over it all, and again the music and Judith's mood turn sour and foreboding. She sings of her fear, but then also... her love? and she demands more keys; no room can be left locked to her. One gets the sense that, as with many operas, there is a belabored metaphor here; apparently, the composer-libretticist duo had some nagging romantic relationships, and felt that women demanded access to every corner of a man's heart. If I were writing an essay, that is the metaphor I'd stick with, as it is heavy and obvious; essay details would weave in and out of musical terminology and staging, adding up subtleties to reinforce whatever particular point I fixed on as the focus of the essay.

But this is no essay; welcome to blogging, where text has less structure, unclear intent, and the writer's voice can be boldly first-person! (Look at how atrociously I break my paragraphs and break into my narrative.) I was satisfied with Bluebeard's dark castle, but Judith demanded more keys, and to fling open all the doors. Bluebeard insisted that this was as light as the castle would get, which nearly caused me to emit an uncultured guffaw: why did he have her start with the dungeon and armoury, then? And surely he knew that they were blood-splattered. He wasn't surprised by it.

By and by, Judith and her persistent, yet fearful, yet determined, yet cautious love wheedle another key from Bluebeard. The stage was filling with rooms, so I got the sense this had to be close to the end; little physical or emotional space remained. Behold! A new room rolled out, and not a single thing in it was bloody. Quelle surprise! Instead, it contained a mute child and a lake of tears. (Only the lake is mentioned in the opera, so the eerie child must have been a production detail.) Bluebeard is super-sad about this and asks Judith to please not ask him any questions. She gets upset and takes off the bloody jewelry she is still wearing from before. This audience member has a momentary reflection that some relationships are just really, really ill-fated.

Judith obeys his request, kind of, though she is still persistent in an indefinite way. She keeps cajoling and eventually obtains a key, definitely the last, which Bluebeard gives her but begs her not to use. She immediately uses it; so much for feminine fidelity and obedience, and her love having any sway over her actions.

To everyone's great surprise, the final door does not conceal the corpses which produced the blood used as (apparently) household decoration throughout the castle. Instead, it reveals three inexplicably-living women, Bluebeard-the-polygamist's current wives. He sings a consummately creepy song about how great they all are, praising each one specifically and showing her off to Judith, before forcing Judith to put the bloody jewelry back on and join them in the wife-prison-room.

The end.

Based on this opera alone, aliens would form a bleak expectation of the relations between human men and women. And also of human interior decorating. But our musical taste is excellent.


This post's theme word is avulse, "to pull off or tear away." The repulsed woman avulsed the gorey jewelry.

Friday night I: Palais Garnier

I live a life of sumptuous luxury. (Alternating with canny poverty, so that it all averages out.) Last night was a brief dart into the extravagant, rococo Palace Garnier to see a double-feature opera, Bluebeard's Cast-Bleue and La Voix humaine.

Palace Garnier's entrance hall is a masterwork of frothy carvings and trompe l'oeil paintings imitating the same.

Built for the opera, as a stage and centerpiece to impress audiences, with the surrounding blocks and roads shaped to make way for it, Palace Garnier is extremely palatial, though it was never a royal home. The lights are now electric but give a decent impression of dim, warm gas-lights.

This is the zone where fancy alcohol is offered beforehand and during intermission. I think the Phantom of the Opera lives in this wing somewhere.

The curtains are real, but there are also painted-on curtains. Real windows, and painted. Real arches, and fake. The sky is real, but the ceiling blocks it with a painted sky; it is always sunny, with fluffy clouds, inside the opera hall. Real cherubs, real half-naked or all-naked nymphs, flitting around the ceiling like birds trapped in a train station. I took some mandatory blurry, ill-lit selfies [not pictured here].

Nimble, pert women --- mostly naked, some bewinged --- crowd about the corners of the ceiling, as if searching for the source of the heavenly music.

If rococo ever makes a comeback, I will gladly count myself among its devoted followers. Modern buildings' off-white walls and grey architectural features, the devotion to sheer flat surfaces and huge reflective windows, forces far too much introspection and beggars the imagination, offering no fodder for daydreams. Much better to beggar the purse, I think, in gilding intricate details so hidden in the ceiling that they are invisible from the floor.

An aura of elegance and refinement is subtly and unsubtly reinforced by the Louis XIV-style gilding of anything stationary.

The music was lush and vibrant, although it did not match the rococo theater, and the set and direction was minimalist, stark, and unsettling. Even in the nosebleed seats, where knees and shoulders are jostled together and there are no aisles, it was a wondrous spectacle to behold. (Plus, we were close enough to the ceiling to count the feathers on cherubs' wings and wonder if the sconce-supporting nude maidens' metal arms ever tire.)


This post's theme word is cosset, "to fondle, caress, pet, indulge, pamper." The cossetting dark embraced the audience of the opera house.

Opera master class

I just saw a master class in opera conducted by Philippe Jordan. Four students presented three pieces, sang through them with various interruptions and corrections, picked up in the middle, made small changes. It was fascinating to see the tiny details of instruction that could have a big impact on the performance. And it was nice to know that the education I received in my Literature & Arts B course on opera --- part of my broad-spectrum liberal arts education, from which cocoon I've emerged an extremely specialized species of math-butterfly --- was spot on. The lines and motifs and dynamics we took apart, meticulously, even pedantically, in the class on opera, were exactly the details that the singers and pianist and conductor also deconstructed.

Perhaps we're all just a product of the same music-studying machine, churning out adoration of Mozart's every trill and embellishment. But at least we match!


This post's theme word is apophenia, "the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data." Opera is the antithesis of the apotheosis of apophenia: the culmination of connotation, in every gesture, word, costume, and backdrop.

Le Nozze di Figaro

I indulgently watched the nearly four-hour-long opera Le Nozze di Figaro last night, a production by Opera Zurich, as broadcast in a comfortable theater in Paris. It was fun, as always, the jokes funny and the musical jokes precise (thanks, Mozart!) and beautifully executed.

One really nice thing about watching operas broadcast in movie theaters is that the camera can zoom in much further than my unassisted eyes, so previously-hidden details become visible: tiny facial movements, costuming specifics. Corners of props and the patterns in the wallpaper. It's nice. Also, the movie theater seats are squishy and comfortable, and viewers have fewer compunctions about coughing during the music. (It recently got colder here, so everyone is sniffling and switching to heavier scarves.)

This particular production had a slightly ribald director --- much of the staging was fairly explicit, to my surprise. (I have previously seen only G-rated versions.) Plus the "trapped in the closet" sequence (hah!) featured a rifle being loaded and brandished across the stage, which was unexpected and added a particularly dark and violent edge to the Count's suspicions about who is hiding in the closet. This echoed the violence of stabbing scissors and knives into all of the cardboard boxes onstage in the first scene (one of which, of course, contains mischievous Cherubino).

I've settled into a version of adulthood that I quite like, where the unusual times I am out late on a weeknight, in a crowded venue, sneaking out of work early to wait in line, I am there to watch an opera and I am among the youngest 10 people in the room (by several decades, although kudos to the three <10 acts="" all="" by="" four="" i="" intoxicated="" it="" kids="" made="" only="" sober="" through="" totally="" who="">leitmotifs
 and the neverending escalation of "sua madre?" "sua madre!" "sua madre?" "sua madre!" "sua madre?" "sua madre!" which, once it starts in my brain, never quite reaches the point of musically ripening into the next verse (hint: "sua padre?" etc.) and just continues, forever.

This post's theme word is Apollonian, "serene, harmonious, disciplined, well-balanced." The Apollonian music was matched by the symmetrical staging (with the exception of the odd number of ponies onstage in act IV).

Don Pasquale

Modern technology is a delight --- yesterday I watched the Zurich Opera's live performance of Don Pasquale. No passport, flight, train, or international travel required: I got to watch from here, where it was broadcast live in a fancy theater. (The crowd was even more homogeneous than usual: mostly gray- and white-haired. Whereas in the nosebleed seats where I dwell at the opera house, I have some coeval audience peers.)

The opera was a delight, too. Zero deaths! It featured many of the little flourishes that make opera buffo such a pleasure: eavesdropping servants in the corners of the stage, silly staging (trigger warning: teddy bear dismemberment and beheading), hiding in shrubberies to sneak to a midnight tryst. Pulling faces behind the patsy's back. The traditional cross-dressing was replaced by one woman pretending to be another woman, each with dramatically different personalities, wardrobe choices, and vocal flourishes. It ended with a wedding, of course, and a big chorus number. The incredible Aspetta, aspetta, cara sposina got cheered back onstage for a reprise before the opera proceeded to the next scene.

The set was a single, large rectangular building which rotated (silently! to not interfere with the ongoing music, even at pianissimo): recto, the titular character's house interior; verso, exterior. Various partial rotations were used for different exterior scenes, with cunning delivery of verdure and lawn furniture, as necessary. The rotating set was briefly used to break the fourth wall during the final scene, but otherwise not as fully, hypnotically used as the incredible set of this production of The Barber of Seville.

If I were in a student setting where an essay, of some literary and scholarly merit, were required of me (a hypothetical to which my brain is predisposed), my thesis would certainly concern the rotating set and the fourth wall. Characters occasionally made asides to the audience (whether in the libretto or at the director's choice), and the fact that the patsy Don Pasquale's house, as well as his interior monologue, intentions, and general mental and physical state, are entirely open to observation, criticism, and judgement --- not only from Ernesto and Norina, but also from the doctor, the servants, and of course the audience itself --- certainly lends itself to the kind of overreading and overwrought analysis in which I delight and (uselessly) excel. Further supporting this approach: the entire opera is staged to open with two characters literally unfurling the wings (walls) of the residence, unrolling them to reveal Don Pasquale's home (and personal state). Plus of course the staging, where certain colors, statues, teddy bears, clothing, and furniture are used as shorthand for his general mental state.

Basically, it's the same hypothesis and academic paper I always write: how form and structure, predict, shape, inform, etc. (your favorite and most pretentious verbs here!) meaning by controlling how, and in what ways, the audience interacts and engages with content.

Meta-essay. My brain always defaults to one level up the hierarchy; I am always in meta-mode. (Simply making this observation has bumped me even one step higher, to meta-meta-mode, which exceeds my late Friday afternoon brain sugar capacity for processing; plus the preceding phrase bounces me one level up the hierarchy, and this observation bounces me again, and again, and again..)


This post's theme word is iatrogenesis (n) or iatrogenic (adj), "an adverse effect resulting from medical advice." Don Pasquale's iatrogenic marital problems are neatly resolved by the end of Act III.

Light, visible

Some very cool effects captured by the combination of stage-lighting and ambient dust in the concert venue made the light fall in beams, which are usually metaphorical.

As you can see, they are here actually visible. The interaction of photons and dust particles combined with the auditory environment to enhance the perception of time passing.

This perception is also emphasized by the fact that these photos have languished in the blogging queue for years. My memories are now reinforced by these pictures, and any organic memories of other perspectives or colors are diminished.

I also remember the cool bathrooms at this venue. But not the venue's name. So, you know, there's that.

This post's theme word is fustilarian, "a fat and slovenly person" and its friend, fustilugs, "a fat and slovenly person." The blog of a fustilugs is delayed, irrelevant, and unreadable.